Daria Unscripted
by Smileyfax
Summary: Daria is forever caught in a deterministic time loop where everybody behaves the same except for her no matter what. Hilarity ensues.
1. Chapter 1

"Girls, I just want you to know your mother and I realize it's not easy moving to a whole new town - especially for you, Daria, right?"

Daria stared at Jake for a second. "Fuck off," she uttered.

Jake laughed a little nervously. "I'm just saying you don't make friends as easily as...uh, some people."

Daria decided to ignore him and, instead, leaned between the two front seats. As Quinn fiddled with the radio and Jake blathered on, Daria uncapped the black permanent marker and wrote 'WHORE' on Quinn's forehead. Quinn acted as if she did not notice.

Jake pulled up to the front of the school and Quinn hopped out of the car. Daria hopped out after her.

"Hi! You're cool. What's your name?" a pig-tailed girl asked. Daria approached the girl from the front and yanked on the pigtails as hard as she could. No reaction.

"Quinn Morgendorffer," her sister replied.

"Cool name," another girl complimented. Daria walked over and full-on punched her in the nose. The three fashion fiends walked together into the school, blood flowing freely down Sandi Griffin's face.

She turned back to see Jake talking to where he expected Daria to be, and shook her head.

XXXX

"Now, Dora, let's see if you can make up a story as vivid as your sister's," Dr. Manson asked.

"My name is Satan," Daria replied. "You will address me as such, mortal."

"I'm sorry...Daria. What do you see in this picture, Dara?"

"I see Ms. Li's severed head being used as a urinal by the football team. I see me running around with a fire axe, driving it into the skull of every child I can find. I see the world on fire. I see death within me."

"Uh, there aren't any ponies. It's two people." Dr. Manson completely ignored Daria. Daria simply remained silent for a moment, then the doctor began talking again. "That's a different test, dear. In this test, they're people, and you tell me what they're discussing."

Daria stuck her hand into her shirt and made armpit farting noises.

XXXX

"Perhaps you feel it's UNFAIR to be asked a question on your first day of class," Mr. DeMartino sneered.

"I feel it's unfair to be stuck in a goddamn time loop where the whole goddamn world except me acting like a goddamned robot, every one of their actions being a result of a pre-programmed script."

"Daria, can you concisely and unemotionally sum up for us the doctrine of Manifest Destiny?"

She sighed and stood up. "Manifest Destiny was a slogan popular in the 1840s, blah blah blah, et cetera and so forth, Viet Cong war." She walked over to Mr. DeMartino, grabbed his head, and pulled it down between her breasts.

"Very good, Daria. Almost...suspiciously good." Which is what he would have said had his face not been muffled by Daria's breasts.

XXXX

"What about you, Daria? How was your first day?" Jake asked.

"I put boogers in all your food," she informed everyone at the table. "Not my boogers, either. I took the boogers right out of your noses and put them in your food. You're eating your own boogers right now."

"That's great"! Jake replied. Daria just walked away from the dinner table as they continued their discussion without her. She took the phone off its base and replaced it with a banana. As sight gags go, it was pretty weak watching Helen answer it, but Daria had pretty much abandoned intelligent humor after her first few lifetimes. After Helen got done extracting the promise of minimal effort on her part from the fruit, she hung up and marched into the kitchen to tell Daria she would be taking a special class blah blah blah it was so damned BORING. So Daria plugged up the drain in the sink, turned the water on full blast, and swiped the keys to the SUV. She felt like being out of the house tonight - and it's not like she would miss anything new.

XXXX

Daria couldn't count the number of times she had sat through Mr. O'Neill's introductory lecture to the self-esteem course. Of course, she hadn't always superglued his mouth shut the night beforehand, so as to mute his drivel. She spent most of the class just staring at Jane. She may have taken her turn as a killer for a great many of her lifetimes (even in this one, Mr. O'Neill would probably starve to death in a few weeks if his mouth didn't become unsealed), but she had never allowed Jane to die.

"I miss you, Jane," she said, hoarse with emotion.

"He doesn't know what it means," she replied to the spot where Daria was supposed to sit. "He's got the speech memorized. Just enjoy the nice man's soothing voice."

Daria couldn't take it any more. She had found, through heavy experimentation, that the fastest way to end her own life and restart the cycle prematurely was to jam her thumbs through her eyeballs and into the brain as fast as she could push her arms. So she did so.

XXXX

She just ignored everything this time around, walking past all the students and teachers going about their normal routine like they did every other lifetime. She realized she was in a funk, and it usually took a few dozen suicides before she snapped out of one. Sometimes, Daria wished she could go incurably insane, but no amount of torment succeeded. Lobotomizing herself (when it didn't outright kill her) only worked until she starved to death and was returned to the start with a new, intact brain; getting infected with a brain-damaging disease like rabies worked the same way.

She decided to spend some more time with Jane, and so headed to Ms. Defoe's classroom (which Jane had this period). She recalled Jane had been painting a picture of an orange with a face, its expression mid-scream as somebody was cutting into it. She entered the room, watched Jane paint an orange with a face screaming as somebody cut into it for all of five minutes, declared "Oh fuck it all" and marched over to Ms. Defoe's desk, where she opened the middle drawer on the left, removed the box cutter inside, and slit her throat open without hesitation.

Something changed.

Jane glanced over at the desk from her easel, and her expression changed into one of horror. "OH MY GOD!" she screamed. "Mrs. Defoe! That girl is bleeding!" She dropped her paintbrush and rushed over to Daria, who was now slumped down in front of the desk.

With the last of her strength, she looked up at Jane's face, and her jaw dropped open in surprise. She lifted one bloody hand up to caress Jane's cheek. "Jane..." she gasped, then fell still.

Tears openly streaming down her face, she turned to see Ms. Defoe...doing nothing at all. She was just going from easel to easel, giving some students a few pointers on their pieces. She rushed over to her teacher, grabbed her arm, and began jerking her to the blood-soaked corpse in front of her desk. "Ms. Defoe! Why aren't you doing anything?" Jane screamed.

The art teacher simply turned to an easel that wasn't there, frowned, and said, "I wish you wouldn't paint such disturbing themes, Jane." And she walked over the corpse like it wasn't even there.

"What's HAPPENING?" Jane shouted to the heavens. She got no response.

XXXXXXXXXX

This was sitting half-finished on my HD for a few weeks before LSauchelli proposed the Time Shift IC, in which Daria gets caught in a time loop dealie from birth until high school graduation, which inspired me to finish this chapter up.

You can already tell the 'rules' are somewhat different from, well, pretty much any time loop fiction I've seen, at least. Here they are, if you're confused:

1. Daria is in a time loop which begins right at the start of the series (Esteemsters) and ends at the end of the series (Is It Fall Yet).

2. Like in Groundhog Day, she can kill herself to go back to the start of the cycle.

3. Everybody's actions are 'scripted', that is, they behave as they normally would, no matter how Daria behaves. (This can be taken to extremes, i.e. Daria could kill a person and other people would still behave as if they were alive and interact/converse with them, etc). The 'actors' will also behave as if the props they interact with are actually there, whether or not they actually are. (If Daria takes a car and parks it somewhere else, its owner will 'get in' to thin air, and 'drive around' while sitting immobile in their driveway).

That last rule is the most obvious divergence from traditional time loop fiction. I do hope it's not too unpalatable. It also is where the name of the fic is derived from - Daria is the only person whose actions are 'unscripted', after all.

To be honest, I've no idea where I'll end up going with this. I could write maybe one more chapter with the material I've got in my head. Maybe I'll leave it open-ended and have other people contribute stuff to it! 


	2. Chapter 2

"Girls, I just want you to know your mother and I realize it's not easy -"

"SHUT THE FUCK UP!" Daria screamed futilely as she once again crawled into the front seat. She unbuckled Jake's seatbelt, reached over him to open the door, and rudely shoved him out, all while he told Daria she didn't make friends as easily as some people. She slipped into the seat, floored the accelerator, ramped the curb, drove through the students milling about outside (flinging their bodies to and fro), and slammed through the front doors of Lawndale High, only then applying the brake.

She leapt out of the car, ignoring Quinn's efforts at doing the same, and dashed to the art classroom. There, she found Jane, splayed out against one wall, tears streaking their way down her face.

"JANE!" Daria flew forward and embraced her friend.

"WHAT'S GOING ON?" Jane screamed, as she attempted to scramble away from the lunatic clutching onto her.

"Jane, Jane - Jane, look, listen to me, okay? You're in a time loop, like in Groundhog Day, but more fucked up, it's years long, Jane, years long, I've been gone so long, but oh, Jane, Jane, Jane..."

Daria finally ran out of air, sometime after Jane slipped from her grasp and wedged herself in the closest corner. "Prove it," she said, clutching her paint brush threateningly.

Daria took a deep breath. "Okay. Last time I saw you, I had just slit my throat, and you...you saw me. You never saw me, I mean the real me instead of the 'me' that the robot you expected to be there...that is, you finally saw me just as I killed myself again. What happened after that?"

Jane gulped. "Um. I tried getting Ms. Defoe, or Ms. Li, or anybody, to come take you to the hospital or something, but they all ignored me. Even Trent. I...After a few weeks, I buried you. I didn't know where you lived or anything, so I just buried you in the football field."

"Bitch," Daria joked.

Jane looked a little off-put at being called a bitch by the stranger, but continued. "After that...I couldn't stay in Lawndale. Everywhere I went, people ignored me, no matter what I did. I walked around naked, stole food, stole money...none of it mattered." Daria nodded; that had been her experience the first time back through. "Then, just a few minutes ago, I...I blinked, I think, and I was back here, and then you came running in. But...how? You died!"

Daria nodded again. "That's right, Jane. I did die...but I came back. I came back...FOR YOU!" She jumped at Jane dramatically, who began shrieking in terror, and Daria could only laugh, even though she was pretty sure Jane had just pissed herself. "Jane, dying resets the time loop...at least, I guess it does for the individual. For me, I slit my throat five minutes ago. It was more than two years for you, though, right?" Jane slowly nodded. "Right around the time you would have graduated." Jane looked startled, but nodded again. "That's when time resets itself, just after our graduation. We're in the same year, I think I forgot to mention. And we're best friends. And...I just realized you don't even know my name. I'm Daria." She held out a hand.

Jane looked at it, double-checked just to make sure it wasn't booby-trapped, and then very gingerly shook it. "Are...are you sure about the dying thing?"

"Sure thing. Here, let me show you." And with a THWAP, Daria's hand was out of Jane's and had struck her in the neck, handily crushing her windpipe in one blow. "Suffocation's slow and awful, but it'll get the job done. If you want to be quick about it, though..." She picked up the paint brush that Jane had dropped in surprise, and approached Jane, who ineffectually held up one arm to try and deflect Daria while clutching her throat with her other hand. "If you want to be quick about it, you need to go in through the eyes."

XXXX

Jane screamed as she raised a hand up to her eye, but then realized that the other girl - Daria, her name was Daria - was nowhere to be seen. She also realized that she was once again breathing.

After a few minutes, Daria walked into the classroom. "See? What did I tell you? The eyes have it."

Jane glared at Daria. "You punched me in the throat. You STABBED ME in the FUCKING EYE."

Daria shrugged. "You got better."

"What kind of a person STABS PEOPLE IN THEIR EYES?"

Daria sighed. "Look, Jane, I want you to understand the new reality: Life isn't just cheap, it's fucking meaningless. Do you know how many times I've killed these jokers?" She waved a hand, indicating the students in the classroom. "Do you have any idea how many people I've killed over the centuries? And yet, every single time I reboot, they come back for more. I would be concerned about it, if I thought that the cycle might end at some point, but...it just doesn't end. It's never...never going to end..." Daria sank to her knees then, and began openly weeping. After a moment, Jane knelt down next to her and put an arm around her.

XXXX

"So...where are we going?" Jane asked. She and Daria were in a Ferrari (borrowed from the Taylor household) going down the highway at somewhere above 120 MPH.

"BFAC."

"BFAC? The Boston Fine Arts College? Why there?"

Daria turned to Jane. "The thought must have crossed your mind at least once since you came to accept the truth of the time loop. You want to use all your infinite free time to mentally enrich yourself as much as possible. So, we go to BFAC, since art is your first love."

"...What sort of stuff did you do at first?"

"Oh, I went 'round the world, devouring every library I could. I'm fluent in over a dozen languages now, incidentally. I attended thousands of different classes in dozens of different institutions. I know how to assemble a nuclear warhead from scratch." She looked at Jane out of the corner of her eye. "That last one was a joke."

"Right. What did you do after that?"

"Oh, the usual. I slid into a spiral of nihilism and destruction, trying to kill absolutely everything I could. I've spent entire lifetimes trying to murder my brain by shoveling as many drugs into it as I could. I may even be the most sexually promiscuous person who ever lived." At Jane's questioning look, she elaborated. "Just find a guy who's about to go at it with some girl, then move the girl out of the way and take her place. Easy."

Jane's recoiled a bit from the explanation. "Isn't that...kind of rapey?"

Daria raised one eyebrow. "Yeah. But how is that any worse from the multitudes of people I've killed? Especially when everything I do is absolutely consequence-less? I'm sure the option will look more attractive to you on your hundredth birthday, or your two hundredth, or your three hundredth."

Jane shuddered, and hoped that it never came to that. "So...what else have you done with your time?"

"Well, for a while, I decided to memorize traffic patterns. That's why I took this highway in particular, I know where every car is going, how fast it's going, et cetera et cetera." She turned to Jane, a playful look on her face. "Watch this." She proceeded to slam the accelerator down while simultaneously covering her eyes with one arm, the other casually resting on the bottom of the steering wheel.

"HOLY SHIT!" Jane screamed as the Ferrari, now accelerating up somewhere past 200, wildly dodged through traffic, all the while Daria singing in her creepy monotone voice the lyrics to the Gary Newman song 'Cars'. As Jane watched, the Ferrari soon came up behind a rather large truck, and Daria made no effort to swerve out of its way. "LOOK OUT!" Jane grabbed the wheel and jerked it hard. Daria opened her mouth to protest.

The car swerved wildly to the right, ricocheting off the concrete wall, sending it back over the lanes until it found its way into oncoming traffic. By sheer luck, the car ran smack into the middle of a gasoline tanker, creating a very impressive fireball, incinerating the car and the two girls inside.

XXXX

They were driving down the same highway, with Jane in the driver's seat, and a pouting Daria in the passenger's seat. And instead of a Ferrari, they had taken Mr. DeMartino's piece of crap which could barely clear 60 MPH.

"I told you, I knew the truck was in front of us," Daria said again for what seemed like the hundredth time.

"Don't care," Jane said, as she kept her focus on the road.

"I just wanted to scare you a little. I would have turned in time."

"Shut up," Jane said sternly.

"You were the one who got us blown up!" Daria accused.

"Not one more word!" Jane shouted, turning to Daria. Unfortunately, she made the amateur driving mistake of turning the wheel along with her head, so they swerved into the next lane, slamming into the side of a flatbed hauling lumber. The flatbed tipped, the lumber fell, and Daria and Jane were crushed by the load.

XXXX

Daria and Jane were riding up to Boston in the cab of a truck they had snuck into at a weigh-in station just down the highway from Lawndale, which they had walked to. The two girls kept shooting angry glares at one another, neither trusting the other to drive without getting them horribly killed again. "At least this way we'll get to Boston in one piece," Jane muttered as they got into the truck. Daria just scowled at this. 


	3. Chapter 3

Jane gaped in horror as she watched Daria enter the room on the other side of the glass, a sledgehammer slung over one shoulder.

They had been having the same argument on and off for the past several years. Jane alleged that their actions still had moral significance, whereas Daria ascertained that they existed in a moral void, citing the essentially static nature of the world as it was. Daria didn't mind the arguments themselves - she enjoyed pretty much any interaction with Jane, really - but the fact that Jane used her moral beliefs to justify not committing suicide at the drop of a hat irritated Daria to no end. Jane kept pointing out that her life was hers to decide how to live, not Daria's, but Daria simply rebutted that her life was just as unchanging and meaningless as everyone else's, so it didn't matter if she lived it to its 'fullest' (a little over two years) or if she ended it prematurely.

Their familiar argument grew much more heated when, one day, Daria casually mentioned having killed a few people only a few weeks ago. This had horrified Jane for understandable reasons, which only served to irk Daria, as she explained to Jane for what had to be the thousandth time that death had no meaning, they would be back once the whole rest of the world rebooted. Jane shot back that maybe they were here to set peoples' lives right like in Groundhog Day, that classic motion picture about a weatherman stuck in a time loop. Daria shot back that this was impossible, she had tried it before, not just once but God knows how many times, but her actions were without fail wiped out the next time 'round. Their arguments after that grew less logical and more screaming.

They had stayed apart from one another for several days after that, but one morning Jane found an envelope taped to her door that instructed her to head to the hospital. There, she followed the spray-painted arrows Daria had left on the walls until there were no more arrows. She wondered why Daria had wanted her to come to the maternity ward.

XXXX

"NO! NO, GOD DAMN IT! NO!" Jane pounded on the glass, screaming at the top of her lungs.

"Jane, you still believe in moral significance," Daria said, over Jane's protests. "I'm going to demonstrate today why you're wrong." And with that, she lazily lifted the sledgehammer over her head and then brought it down like she was at the 'Test Your Strength' game at a carnival. Only instead of a stuffed bear, her prize was the shattering of the incubator in front of her, and the silencing of the squealing newborn inside.

Daria moved on to the next incubator and repeated her action, then moved on again, and again, and again. Jane had tried the door leading into the room, but found that Daria had barricaded it, and could not find any more obvious ways inside. She finally seized up a chair sitting against the opposite wall and begain wailing against the glass barrier between her and the infanticide Daria was waging. It took a few tries to break through the thick glass, but she eventually managed, and she clambered over the empty frame, slicing her hands up on the glass fragments still inside. She disregarded the injuries and charged at Daria, as she was about to bring the hammer down on another baby.

She knocked Daria to the floor, wrapped her hands around Daria's neck, and began slamming the other woman's head down on the floor again and again. "I WON'T LET YOU HURT THEM AGAIN!" Jane cried out over and over, until finally, she realized that Daria was dead by her own hand. Jane flung herself away from the body, then staggered over to a nearby trash can and vomited. She moved the blockade from the door, took one last look at Daria, then fled the room, the hospital, the city, the state, the country...she even considered hitching a ride aboard one of the shuttles, to get away from the whole damned planet. Instead, she spent the rest of the cycle chilling out with Penny, even though she was as unresponsive to her as Trent was back home.

Finally, the cycle began anew, and Jane found herself standing in front of that damn painting again. She knocked the canvas aside, frustrated, and flopped down into Ms. Defoe's chair, watching the door Daria would walk through.

She did not walk through the door.

That night, she made her way to the Morgendorffer homestead, to find out where Daria had gone. She found Daria, alright. Daria sat in the back of her father's car, thumbs jammed firmly into her eye sockets, her preferred method of suicide.

After the first few cycles, Jane stopped bothering to check on Daria.

XXXX

Fifty cycles passed by. Maybe a little more or a little less; Jane lost count. Finally, at the beginning of the latest cycle, it happened.

"Hey."

Jane didn't bother turning around. She just covered over her painting with endless swirls. "Hey," she responded.

"It's been about an hour for me. How about you?"

"A...century. I think."

"And you still haven't accepted that morality is dead," Daria said mournfully. "Jane, this is Hell. I never did anything to deserve going to Hell, and neither did you, but yet, here we are." She took Ms. Defoe's chair. "Did I ever tell you about my daughter?"

Jane whipped her head from the canvas. "No."

"I got busy with Trent once." At Jane's look of disapproval, Daria waved dismissively. "I know, I know, rape is wrong, that's not the point. The point is, that one time, he got me pregnant. I had a daughter, without the help of modern medicine I might add, since all the OBGYNs in the world had other appointments." Daria took off her glasses and dabbed at her eyes. "She was beautiful, and she was...alive. Alive like you and I are alive, not the rest of these fucking clowns," she gestured to the other students and Ms. Defoe. "Two months after her first birthday, the cycle reset itself, and she was erased from existence forever. That's how I know this is Hell." 


End file.
